How to be Free

On a flight from London to New York City, I sat next to a long, elegant woman who wore at least three sweaters and her sharp-eyed son. I learned that they were in London for just over a week on holiday. They walked fifteen miles one day, ten the day before. All the way to Canary Wharf, the son confirmed. She lived in London years ago to complete a Master’s degree, and mostly remembered being cold. 

It is six in the morning. When I travel over oceans, I like to take advantage of the temporal dislocation and wake early, staying, for a week or so, with the schedule of wherever I was before. It is six in the morning, and I’m reacquainting myself with the place where I have lived for most of seven years. It has only been three weeks since my most recent departure, and yet I feel like a visitor in my old life. There is a new juice store on the corner of 84th and 2nd. I like that New York goes on living without me. In a park along the bank of a familiar river, signs of summer are beginning to make way for the cobalt crimson shades of Fall, as they do each year. Along the water, a woman dressed in shorts and sunglasses out of place on a gray day tears loaf after loaf of bread for clouds of birds that expand and contract with each passerby. Does she do this each morning?

I want to, but don’t know how to, hold on to all the warmth of the last weeks. My tan will fade, certainly. I never imagined the German sun could so effectively cloak the natural pearly red blue green tone of my skin. It looks like tomorrow should be sunny here, so I might sit in the park in a bikini top to fasten this colour to my chest, arms, legs for a few days more. But it will go, eventually. I’m more worried that as I unpack my green shorts and dirty socks, I’ll misplace the clarity I felt in between words while I was away. Is there a drawer for such things? I am afraid I will forget the multiplicity I allowed myself in each one of the 384,915 steps I took across Germany, France, Switzerland, and England (I added them up this morning). As much as I may commit to new habits and ways of being, New York has a way of snapping you back onto its grid.

I have been asked for a “headline” about my trip, to summarize this great adventure on rivers and roads and railway tracks. I don’t know what to say. One response has been, ‘Yes, I have always loved Berlin, and I will—I must—move back.’ I have said this or else responded to its interrogative cousin with a quiet nod so that others may have something to report back about my time away. But it isn’t as simple as that. I wish I hadn’t been asked to distill, at least not yet. How am I meant to explain that on this trip, which was in some ways two trips (a River Cruise up the Rhine and then a Sojourn in Berlin), I encountered every known version of myself: young and old, remembered and forgotten, widowed and single, dancing and still, bullied and loved, healthy and ailed, light, bright, dark and hurt. Mexican, American, Argentine, English. They were all there, everywhere. Will others understand that I was myself and also everyone I met? It was only three weeks and yet also something of a lifetime.

I’m now at the Midnight Diner on 89th Street and 2nd Avenue. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is on its way. A waiter places an offensively tall tower of pancakes on the table before me. It is topped with a red sausage split in two lengthwise. I have to ask him to bring maple syrup. Behind me, there is a table of four; they have been up all night. “When a man says ‘yeah’ three times, there’s a woman on the other side of the line. We’re 50, you’re not fooling me.” These are far too many pancakes. Indulgence and abundance begin to lose their delight. Was there a smaller order size I missed? “Okay but what other mammals have sex with only one other being for the rest of their fucking life? It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. He fucked up. It’s okay. I’m not leaving him for that. It’s okay. It wasn’t a relationship; he wasn’t emotionally cheating.” One of the night crawlers comes and goes from her table, eager to obey the sun and finally bring an end to their night, though the others sit still. The sausage, allegedly turkey, is unexpectedly spicy. When I pay, I have to leave three half pancakes melting in syrup behind. There’s no point carrying them back home.

I like these first hours after a long trip because, in them, I see all things again. I take a moment to inspect a pink flowering tree with petals that look like crumpled paper. While my soul catches up with my body, there is a brief respite of the familiar becoming unknown. Further ahead on the street, a concerningly large tabby cat is splayed across a residential window, and a sign above his hind legs tells me his (her?) name is Patty. How did you get so big, Patty? Is this temporary new perspective simply a product of dislocation?

Before I left, I fell into a crisis of insecurity and discomfort. When I looked at images of myself, I saw only faults: imperfect clothing, rolls of flesh where I wanted to see just muscle or bone, fine hairs or lines where I wished to see firm smoothness. It was a normal enough set of feelings, which I am nearly certain most of you have experienced in some form or another. But I became worried because these moments of refraction spilled into my relationships and I began attributing the negative feelings to others: my friends can’t stand me, my family doesn’t like me, I will never be anything but alone. One day, during my company retreat at the end of July, I sat before a notebook filled with post-it notes carrying kind, caring compliments about the role I have played in the firm. My neck tensed up as I tried to read them. My chest became tight, unable to enjoy words I didn’t think I deserved.

My phone buzzes to tell me that last week, I averaged only twenty minutes a day staring at its screen. I’m usually at an hour and a half, if not more. In “normal” times, I mean. Last week, I spent most of my time outside, in the physical world, with people. My phone only played its necessary role: capturing some of these moments and guiding me from place to place. My life seemed so full last week. Why, instead, would I fill another hour of my day on this device? I allow screens to direct my gaze too much. The danger isn’t just that I look at them but rather that I look through them to understand the world. I cede the power of my gaze to others. It has been refreshing to see for myself again.

One of many ordinary revelations during this trip was just how much I love walking with another person. Many, if not most, of the 384,915 steps were taken alongside someone else. On one of these walks, I learned of the note that my grandfather left his parents when he was offered a spot on a ship for work in England from Argentina. On another, I revisited classrooms and hallways I once roamed dressed in a grey, white, and forest green school uniform. And on a third, I confirmed a new group of “aunties” who will be responsible for interviewing any future romantic prospects. Walking through a railway that is now a park in Berlin, a friend I had not seen in something like ten years asked me to consider why I desire so much with my mind rather than heart or body. You are too much mind, he said. A familiar critique. After we crossed a former palace garden now turned bar and café, I couldn’t name a moment of my life when my primary purpose wasn’t to train, develop, pr expand my mind. I had never realized that this is how I have operated.

All through my end-of-July wanderings, I felt restless, insatiable—what was to become of me, why am I not who I think I should be. The week ahead of my departure, Eric Fromm’s Escape from Freedom accompanied me in my crisis. “The assumption underlying the thinking of Luther and Calvin, and also that of Kant and Freud”, he writes, “is: Selfishness is identical with self-love. To love others is a virtue, to love oneself is a sin.”

I can’t remember exactly when it was, but in one of those weekends of July, I went out and got extremely, unnecessarily drunk. I don’t really know why. The next day, I had a hideous hangover, and, between purging, a thought flashed through my mind: “it is as if I had tried to poison myself.” I don’t mean this in a drastic way; I am and was okay, but sitting before the toilet, everything felt acute. Fromm continues, “Selfishness is not identical with self-love, but with its very opposite […] Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit […] the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with himself, he is never satisfied, is always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more.” He closes, “Narcissism, like selfishness, is an overcompensation for a basic lack of self-love.”

I am worried that this newsletter is nothing but a register of each cycle of crisis and resolution—I tend to write to you in moments of either elation or despair. I find an answer to our animating question and it slips away, such that I must find it again, in another form. I hope that what I’ve learned from this last turn doesn’t disappear so readily, as it feels particularly weighty and meaningful. Most meaningful has been the realization that I am free to enjoy my life as it unfolds before me. The key, this time, is in the term freedom. Fromm explains that freedom can be burdensome (the unknown is vast and scary, after all). We seek to escape freedom by granting others our agency and authority. This is how we slip into authoritarianism and the like. Our task is to become acquainted with our freedom, so that we can live into it, rather than push it away.

I studiously avoided conversation for a few hours on the flight last night, hiding away in one book and then another. I have just been around too many people, I said to myself. I need space for myself. Eventually my travel companions and I struck up conversation over a fidgety set of in-flight meal wrappers that proved difficult to open. Open crackers in hand, we raised our cans of coke (one diet, one regular) to one another and smiled. We discussed love and jobs, mostly, though we spent some time giggling about how profoundly weird a café-slash-bar called Stella and Fly on 1st between 88th and 89th can be. They never have hot water! Their grilled cheese sandwiches suddenly disappeared! What about that downstairs basement! It was fun to find familiarity of that kind so far away from the world. Anyway, more importantly, at one point in our meandering conversation,—I can’t remember how or when we got there, but what is important is the moment, not the transition—my travel companion shared that her mother, upon hearing the phrase “find yourself”, scoffed: “Find yourself? Look in the mirror. There you are.”

Sometimes, it’s simple. There I have always been.